For the Christian, prayer is a lifestyle and not just an emergency contact…
The hour of prayer and Bible reading is probably the most neglected discipline of our spiritual walk.
Jesus asked His disciples to tarry with Him in prayer for one hour.
Are we willing to give Him that one hour a day?
God is calling for His church to awake, to arise to righteousness (His way of doing and being right).
This includes a life dedicated to prayer – communion with the Holy Trinity, the great Three in One.
Prayer isn’t something a person does; it is something he lives.
Prayer is where you find mercy and grace—it is where you learn to move throughout the day in the rhythms of grace.
If you are a Christian – a disciple of Christ, which means a follower of Christ, then Jesus needs to be the hub of your life around which everything in your life revolves.
There are too many people who are Nominal Christians, I know because I used to be one of them, meaning I was Christian in name only, but did not have a relationship with Jesus.
That’s where the necessity of our being born-again comes into play.
Jesus said that, “If you love Me you will keep My Word and obey My commandments and then My Father and I will come and make our abode with you” (read John 14:15, 23).
1 John 2:4-6 tells us (in the J.B. Phillips New Testament)
3-6 It is only when we obey God’s laws that we can be quite sure that we really know him.
The man who claims to know God but does not obey his laws is not only a liar but lives in self-delusion.
In practice, the more a man learns to obey God’s laws the more truly and fully does he express his love for him.
Obedience is the test of whether we really live “in God” or not.
The life of a man who professes to be living in God must bear the stamp of Christ.
The New King James Bible puts it this way, “He who says he abides in Him (in Jesus) ought himself also to walk just as He (Jesus) walked.”
Jesus is our hub, our focus, and the way we do this is that we learn to walk daily, by faith, in obedience to His Word, and not by sight.
Listen to what Paul said:
Romans 12:1-2
J.B. Phillips New Testament
We have seen God’s mercy and wisdom: how shall we respond?
1-2 With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him.
Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity.
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By immersing ourselves in the water of God’s Word and in the Holy Spirit, we are then allowing the Holy Spirit to rewrite the code – the corrupt programming that we all have received from this world, and replace it with God’s programming.
This is the importance of prayer in our life, in fact in First Thessalonians 5:17 we are told to “pray without ceasing.”
In other words what this is saying is that prayer is mostly our listening to God, and in order for us to do this God wants us to keep that vertical connection with Him 24/7 365, just like we read in the Bible that Jesus did.
The Power of Prayer
Prayer moves the arm that moves the world
“God has of his own motion placed himself under the law of prayer, and has obligated himself to answer the prayers of men.
He has ordained prayer as a means whereby he will do things through men as they pray, which he would not otherwise do.
If prayer puts God to work on earth, then, by the same token, prayerlessness rules God out of the world’s affairs, and prevents him from working.
The driving power, the conquering force in God’s cause is God himself.
‘Call on me and I will answer thee and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not!’
Through prayer, God is challenging us to seek His face and His wisdom, in order that we may gain knowledge on how we should live our lives.
[This is, in fact, the reason we were created, to have this unending communion and fellowship with our Creator, and without that vertical connection with Him, in our life, we are all like fish flopping around on the shores of life, looking for our way back home.]
Prayer puts God in full force into God’s work.”
[E.M. Bounds “The Weapon of Prayer” Chap. 2]
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